Domestic Life in New England in the Seventeenth Century

What did ordinary people actually own in colonial New England? George Francis Dow spent years hunting through dusty court records and estate inventories, cataloguing the beds, brass kettles, Bibles, and breach-loaded guns that populated seventeenth-century homes. The result is not the romanticized Thanksgiving tableau we learned in school, but something far more human: a society of sharp class distinctions, where a wealthy merchant's house bristled with imported English furniture while a frontier family scraped by in a drafty timber cottage. Dow systematically dismantles myths log-cabin legends and all revealing a people obsessed with comfort, status, and domestic order. Specific families emerge from the paperwork: the Dillinghams with their feather beds and silver, the Googes struggling on rougher land. Through inventories that read like archaeological digs, Dow reconstructs what it actually felt like to live in a world without glass windows, where your chest of drawers was your primary possession and your spinning wheel your most essential tool. Nearly a century old, this remains the foundation for understanding how ordinary colonists lived, fought, and made homes in a unforgiving land.